Vanished Splendors: A Memoir

Book Description

The painter Balthus, whose tenacity and cultivated taste for secrecy have enveloped him in an aura of forbidding mystery, wrote this memoir at the end of his long life.A man who for decades opted to "give expression to the world" rather than to "express" himself speaks for the first and only time about his life, family, work, his theory of art and how it intersects with history, literature, and spirituality.

Balthus was born Balthasar Klossowski in 1908 to Polish art historian Erich Klossowski and his wife, the painter Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro. The family lived in Germany, France, and Switzerland. In this memoir Balthus describes his childhood with his mother and her lover -- the poet Rainer Maria Rilke -- who became Balthus's own spiritual mentor. He evokes la vie de boheme in Paris during the 1920s, his friendships with Picasso, Derain, Artaud, Giacometti, Saint-Exupéry, René Char, Pierre Jean Jouve, and Albert Camus. He discusses his paintings, offers glimpses into his marriage, and expresses his passion for Chinese art and the Swiss chalets and Italian villas that he helped to restore. He recalls touching moments with his beloved daughter Harumi and the inspiration he drew from his cats. Also, in a kind of final lesson, Balthus shares his thoughts about painting and creation, denounces contemporary art as being illusory and deceitful, and talks candidly about his Catholic faith and how it inspired his work.

"We are most charmed by the memoir's ease of expression, as if Balthus were confiding in us, as individuals," writes Joyce Carol Oates in her introduction to Vanished Splendors. "We are brought into a startling intimacy with genius."

Customer Reviews:

A must read for thinkers of art.......2005-03-02

This Blathus memoir is absolutely beautiful. You feel as if Balthus is sitting right beside you sharing his most personal reflections. He shares not only about his approach to painting but also about many areas he considers to be blessings and difficulties for his life. An intimate and inspiring read. For any young artist or book collector of art this is a must have.

The great Balthus in his own words.......2004-01-29

When it comes to twentieth century painters, Balthus is one of the most important and certainly one that stands out from the rest. He is enigmatic and people often misunderstand his paintings. Vanished Splendors is Balthus' memoirs that he was working on at the time of his death. In it he puts forth his philosophy on many subjects such as art, modern art, life, religion, family, love and history. He's known or met most of the important artisians of the last century. Picasso, Camus, Artaud, Monet and more. This is a quick read and gives insight into his world and how he painted (he often took years to finish one canvas). Very enjoyable and informative.

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The Weber Case
Capturing Balthus
Decadence! Oh my!
Balthus: A Biography
No perspective or sense of scale

Balthus: A Biography
Nicholas Fox Weber
Manufacturer: Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Vanished Splendors: A Memoir

ASIN: 0679407375
Release Date: 1999-10-12

Amazon.com

Balthus is as multifaceted and spellbinding as its subject, the 20th-century painter whose canvasses have been likened both to those of the ethereal Piero della Francesca and sadomasochistic erotica. Biographer Nicholas Fox Weber quotes Oscar Wilde when discussing Balthus's most notorious painting, in which a music teacher violently molests her young pupil: "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.... And so Balthus claimed to me time and again. If viewers find The Guitar Lesson ... shocking or titillating, repulsive or seductive, they reveal only their own psyches, not his." Balthus repeatedly insisted on noninterpretive, pre-Freudian, stylistic observation of his paintings--mere studies in light and shadow, form and shape, composition and color--or so he would have Weber (and the reader) believe.

Weber describes his own psychological near-seduction by Balthus's proffered confidences, and his brief, initial inclination to allow the artist to dominate their interviews. Despite Balthus's gift for prevarication--romance on short notice is his specialty--Weber is astute enough to sift through every possible document. He elucidates Balthus's mother's long affair with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke; her Jewish ancestry, which Balthus denied; the atmosphere of religious mockery among the surrealists; Balthus's marriages and affairs and his obsession with pubescent girls. As the book progresses, Weber delves deeply into an analysis of the artist's psyche. In the end, he achieves remarkable, sensitive insights into the nature of Balthus's character and subjects. He patiently builds a case for the theory that even the artist's female adolescent models reflect his secret selves and fantasies, developed in reaction to many kinds of childhood pain and confusion.

Weber secures every important painting within a framework of historical reference, personal psychology, and stylistic influence. With this he demonstrates his uniqueness among biographers of artists--he actually understands painting, including its technical aspects. A hugely pleasurable read, this book compares to Hilary Spurling's The Unknown Matisse in its erudition and richness of detail. --Peggy Moorman

Book Description

The first full-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time -- the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola -- whose brilliantly rendered, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art.

The story of Balthus's life has been shrouded by contradiction and hearsay, most of it his own invention; over the years he created for himself a persona of mystery, aristocracy, and glamour. Now, in Nicholas Fox Weber's superb biography, Balthus, the man and the artist, stands revealed as never before.

He was born in Paris in 1908 to Polish parents. At age twelve he first stepped into the spotlight with the publication of forty of his drawings illustrating a story about a cat by Rainer Maria Rilke, who was then Balthus's mother's lover and a crucial influence on the young boy. From that moment, Balthus has never been out of the public eye.

In 1934 his first exhibition, in Paris, stunned the art world. The seven canvases drew attention to his extraordinary technique -- a mix of tradition and imagination informed by the work of Piero della Francesca, Courbet, and Joseph Reinhardt, but unique to the twenty-six-year-old artist -- and to their provocative content; one of the paintings, The Guitar Lesson, was so powerful in its sadomasochistic imagery that it was deemed necessary to remove it from public display.
Continuously since then, Balthus's work has provoked both great opprobrium and profound admiration -- as has the artist himself, whether collaborating with Antonin Artaud on his Theater of Cruelty, transforming the Villa Medici into the social center of Fellini's Rome in the 1950s, or competing for the artistic limelight with his friends Picasso and André Derain.

The artist's complexities are clarified and his genius understood in a book that derives its particular immediacy from Weber's long and intense conversations with Balthus -- who never previously consented to discuss his life and work with a biographer -- as well as his interviews with the painter's closest friends, members of his family, and many of the subjects of his controversial canvases.

Weber's critical and human grasp (he acutely analyzes the paintings in terms of both their aesthetic achievement and what they reveal of their maker's psyche), combined with his rich knowledge of Balthus's life and his insight into the ideas and forces that have helped to shape Balthus's work over the past seven decades, gives us a striking, illuminating portrait of one of the most admired and outrageous artists of our time.

Customer Reviews:

The Weber Case.......2001-07-01

This book has disappointed me greatly.To all the negative reviews displayed here I can only add more... Its apparently well researched subject is just a cover-up for making yet another buck, using an artist who is lesser known, often misunderstood and provocative. Any biography of Balthus would have been appreciated at the time of the artist's old age and the obviously quick aproach of death, and people like Mr. Weber, unfortunately, quite often are the first to write in such moments. This is not a book about Balthus or his life or his art, it is about quickly making a name for himself and some money off Balthus, in the name of his art, when it was still possible. Inaccessability of Balthus the person has allowed only a small circle of friends, family members, and patrons to benefit financially, and socially from Balthus's name and Art, however Mr.Weber, a parvenue as he is, craved for some of it too. The result - is this book, a book about infiltrating oneself ( or trying to) into a privileged society of artists, aristocrats, wealthy collectors, celebs etc. and then - just " telling all" about who they really are: pretenders, liers, perverts and above all - anti-Semites... I only regret three thing about this book: That I have spent money to buy it ( so contributing to the cause of Mr.Weber); that I have read this book ; that we have all here read this book. PS: To my knowledge, there is not a single Novgorod near Pinsk, or anywhere in Belarus, and Mr.Weber was probably alluding to Novogrudok ( Nowogrodek, Navahrudak) about 125km from Minsk. (Weber might have thought that throwing in some obscure town names from Eastern Europe and ambelishing that book with them would make his "research" look more professional)

Capturing Balthus.......2000-10-06

This is a superb biography in which the author willingly submits to a cat and mouse game with the husband and wife team of Balthus and Setusko, both of whom seem supremely confident that they can seduce and manipulate the biographer into telling only the tale they feel the world deserves. Like a good psychoanalyst, Weber allows himself to be taken in and then slowly works his way back out, transformed, but intact. There are so many layers to this story that it makes sense for Weber to include his own narrative as a way to contain and to bind. Balthus comes across as a wonderful paradox as Weber experiences him as both tender and sadistic, real and unreal. Perhaps Weber's own propensity for sharing unflattering details of many of the people he meets along the way (a woman fondling her breast during an interview; the outrageously tasteless home of a California collector, are examples) is a natural response to the sadism that Balthus, himself, disowns time and time again. Weber engages in many acts of bravado during the writing of this book and toward the end describes an amazing meeting between Balthus and the author's own two young daughters -- they seem to have been raised with a hearty, self-assurance. At no time does one feel that the author's intrusions are gratuitous. He does a wonderful job of illuminating aspects of Balthus' life, thought,and art, and his psychoanalytic riffs on the paintings ring true and are expressed in a down-to-earth manner. Of course, how could one ever get to the heart of the matter when it comes to Balthus? But in the end, Balthus, the trickster, gets respectfully what he deserves. Certainly it might make him wince, but then for the artist who early on loved to shock, turnabout is fair play. Bravo to Nicholas Fox Weber who allows himself to feel toward his subject a complex set of emotions that when examined helps to capture some truths about this complicated artist.

Decadence! Oh my!.......2000-08-15

The story told in this book is not an original one. In fact, it is, in outline, the same story that provided Henry James with his best plots: a prim New Englander, in Europe for a noble cause, is attracted to, but finally repelled by, those decadent Europeans. Nicholas Fox Weber writes his own story, but he shows us how accurately James observed the appeal and the repulsion that a certain kind of European had -- and still has -- for a certain kind of American.

If Lambert Strether, from "The Ambassadors", or the heroine of "The Portrait of a Lady", had written about their own experiences among the rich and sophisticated old-money types from the continent, their stories would have had many similarities to Weber's. At first he is charmed and approving of the old-world manners with which he is received. Balthus is charming. He answers the phone himself! Just slightly distracted, as older people can be, Balthus regales Weber with anecdotes of the famous and infamous celebrities that he has known, and Weber feels blessed. The great artist has deigned to confide in him. He is in the presence not only of great talent, but of great taste as well, and if such a hero includes him at the dinner table, it must be a kind of validation.

It is later that he feels seduced and misled. Balthus has lied! Balthus has invented stories about himself, to seem more romantic and more mysterious! The sophistication of the great houses holds dark secrets... there is a hint of non-noble blood... there is a hint of anti-semitism.... there is a hint that even the lady of the house can commit a faux pas with the queen of Spain! There were parties in Rome which lasted all night, at which seductions may have occurred! Weber is shocked. It may be the world of the great artists, but it is definitely not the world of which a good American would approve.

There is one major difference, though, between this book and the one Lambert Strether would have written. If James' hero had been invited into the home of one of the world's wealthiest men, to see a masterpiece which few people have had a chance to see in the last 50 years, he would have shown gratitude to the man who allowed him into his bedroom. Lambert Strether, if he had seen a box of hemorrhoid medicine on the night table, would have turned his eyes away with discretion, and made no mention of it to anyone. Yet this is the detail that Weber uses as the climax of the scene, and it is not the only lurid one that seems to hold a fascination for him. When you finish reading this book, what stays in your mind is not a new understanding of Balthus' background, and still less a new look at Balthus' art. What you remember is the roll of flab around Claus von Bulow's middle, or the lovely interviewee who fondles herself.

This is not a book about Balthus. It is about Weber and his disapproval. He should have named it "Lifestyles of the Rich and Slimy". It sure was fun to read.

Balthus: A Biography.......2000-04-04

This was the largest waste of paper I have read in quite a long time. The author is long winded and tiresome. I gave up sifting through all the garbage to find anything relevant to Balthus and his painting. Some of the color reproductions are good, but then buy the Claude Roy book.

No perspective or sense of scale.......2000-02-18

Balthus, The Count of Rola, The King of Cats, part ethnically Jewish Roman Catholic, self-invented, self-taught, king of the figurative painters of the last century, deserved a better biographer than this.

Nicholas Fox Weber has very strong opinions about his subject. Unfortunately, his opinions take on the form of judgment and one can only have wished that he would have had the intelligence to bow out and leave the task to someone who could temper their passion with objectivity.

Balthus wants to remain an enigma. This is well known. To assume he would be the one to gain the artist's full trust and candor was hubris on Weber's part. Of course, Balthus' reinvented past posed problems to the author but as he points out in his Afterword, he was forewarned. Instead of being persistent, even confrontational, Weber wimps out. He gives up. He proclaims Balthus a hopeless, self-deluded, pathological liar. And so, he relies almost exclusively on second- and third-hand accounts including those from excommunicated friends whose motives are questionable. Even worse, he stands in for the artist, assuming he knows what the artists would have to say about his observations and gathered conflicting facts.

Weber's frustration is visible on every page-he takes it out on his subject. Like an adolescent discovering the fallibility of an adored parent, Weber magnifies the flaws and uses every opportunity to illustrate them. One senses the author, feeling challenged, is on a mission to strip the artist bare and then mockingly point out his shortcomings. It is not a question as to whether all accusations may be true; Weber makes some convincing arguments (as well as some amazing assumptions). But the tone is adversarial and without compassion, sense of proportion, and sometimes simple decency. (When Weber discovers that Balthus' two-year-old son died from Tay Sachs disease, he holds the fact up as proof of Balthus' denied Jewish heritage and some kind of divine justice. It's absolutely horrifying.)

Weber lets us know that he is not above the vain snobbery he attributes to his subject, when in the last chapter he waxes rhapsodic when Balthus dotes over his two young daughters. But then, in the Afterword, he accuses the same man of being pedophiliac when he dotes over another adolescent, his latest model Anna Valli, in a photo shoot. Like some beauty pageant stage-father he comments on Anna as being dressed "too sexy" a "knowing Lolita... delighting in her stardom." Catty and jealous beyond belief.

Customer Reviews:

biography or art analysis?.......2001-10-25

The color reproductions are excellent, far better than most art books. My main problem with the book is that it does little to link the artist's life with the substance of the paintings. It is as though there are two thrusts in the book; Balthus' biography and his work but very little on how the two interact.

Good quality reproduction, good selection, ordinary text.......1999-01-05

I had a look at this book and I intend to buy it.

It has a good selection of pictures, including some important ones that are missing from other books (eg the guitar lesson).

Quality of images is good and captures the pictures I have seen in person well.

The commentary adds little to the pictures but does have some interesting material about Balthus. and some pictures of him.

Book Description

Balthazar Klossowski, known as Balthus, is largely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most important painters-- as well as the most scandalous. His dreamlike canvases populated with pubescent girls in provocative poses garnered him both praise and scorn from artists and critics alike. This volume, edited by renowned scholar Jean Clair, includes more than 400 color plates and includes essays by the premier experts on Balthus's work and life as well as recollections of the artist by his colleagues and friends.

Since the beginning of his seventy-five year career, he was admired for his extraordinary ability to straddle tradition and modernity, as is evident with his references to Renaissance masters such as Piero della Francesca. His work also revealed ties to early modernism as his first apprenticeships were guided by Claude Monet, Emile Bonnard, and André Derain. Nonetheless, by 1926, the year of his first solo exhibition in Paris, the exceptional "newness" of his work had garnered him a distinguished following including major French intellectuals such as Georges Bataille, Albert Camus, and Antonin Artaud.

This volume, which accompanies the largest exhibition to date of the artist's work, traces every stage of Balthus's career including an essay devoted to his early life and influences as well as a chapter devoted to the influence of Chinese paintings on his landscapes. A portion of the book is devoted to recollections by his friends who shed light on the elusive painter's life. The volume is complete with an extensive catalogue of his work which includes paintings, drawings, sketches for theatre sets as well as scores of photos of the artist taken by major photographers.

Customer Reviews:

Balthus - More than a glimpse at the work of a genius.......2007-05-08

For those who don't have the resources to purchase Balthus Catalogue Raisonne - the Complete Works, this is a very good secondary choice. Comprehensive in its compilation, Balthus is a joy to own. Throughout the book's pages one discovers this brilliant artist's ingenious talent through text and images, and possibly discerns that he is himself seduced by ingénue and adolescence. I believe Balthus captures this aspect intelligently, albeit somewhat seductively, but there are those who will not agree. There is humor and sadness too in his work. You see both in Balthus' first published work when Mitsou, a small book of drawings emerged. Mitsou was a kitten when found and later lost, that constantly appears as a full grown cat throughout Balthus' paintings. I believe the repetitive appearance of Mitsou illustrates the artist's emotional need for adolescent comfort that continued well beyond puberty. The author informs the reader of this in a very subtle way. Very definitely this is a book that delivers a broad introduction to Balthus where we are given more than a glimpse of his work in animated illustrations, study drawings, theatre set designs, portraits, landscapes, citiscapes, frescoes and still lifes. Furthermore, the author does provide a glance into the artist's interractions with his contemporaries but offers very little about Balthus' private life. I wonder if Balthus shrouded himself in mystery to parlay the truth of genius so often revealed in his paintings? Always distant, his life remains cloaked in contradictions. There are two versions of this book - French and English translation - I recommend them both.

A solid collection of studies.......2004-01-16

This book is really a must for anyone who wishes to know everything there is "available" to know about the painter's work and position vis-a-vis modern art in relation to the traditional canon of European painting.
A job of this size would have been simply too much for any one author to handle alone with the degree of thoroughness that was attempted here; and so it was not. Many scholars have come together to shed light on various facets of Balthus' work: reference, method, technique, and influence. Here you will find a rich collection of obscure sketches, out-takes, doodles, and comparisons / parallels with Master paintings.

In addition to the essays and studies, every Balthus painting collected in this volume is examined individually but concisely: text on one page with the painting on the other so that one can understand what is being described, and appreciate the work at the same time.

HOWEVER, the color reproductions are less than 5 stars. Leans too much to brown/red. If color accuracy is important to you, Claude Roy's is the best so far. So if you love B's work, get both: I did. For the richness of the analyses, this one is hands-down superior, and indispensible.

Guy Davenport did some amazing analysis of B's work -- collected in his _Bathus Notebook_ This wonderful work is cited on several occasions and deservedly so. Study B's work better and you will avoid the meretricious vulgrity of applying adjectives like "perverse" to B's work, or "nubile" to speak of nudes, as if the word were synonymous with 'erotic,' or 'slim.' The question of nubility (marriageability) is simply irrelevant, and this book will reward the thoughtful reader by disabusing her of the banality of art-talk cliches and solecisms.

If you are more than just an "art appreciator," then this volume will help to enrich your understanding of art beyond just Balthus'.

All about Balthus.......2003-01-12

The painter Balthus, nee Balthazar Klossowski, is one of the most original and disturbing of European modern painters.He is something of a cult. I am happy to have received, promptly, this rather smart, large book dedicated entirely to his enigmatic work. This is the capricious plastic world of the elusive painter Balthus, where females endlessly appear, like succubus, gracing an artistic landscape that's both alluring and repulsive. One cannot help but compare some of the imagery in the Interpretation of Dreams by Freud, to the visions depicting Balthus sexual agonies. Look up Balthus 'La Chambre' on page 329, perhaps one of the most inspired and perverse canvases, ever. There is no other painter like him. Like Picasso he shocks, but with a much more simple and personal vocabulary. There is something of El Greco here, the angst. He is limited like Modigliani though soon his ouvre becomes very telling. A persistent parade of pictorially enticing nubiles that is both delicious and repellent. The book by Rizzoli is a treasure almost 500 pages in all. Part art book part encyclopedic tome. Many color pages. In this book by Jean Clair there are, along the many art pages, also photographs, sketches, private correspondence, etc. A lot of personal information offered us fascinated by Balthus. It's a big book that can double as an object d'art. I'm more than pleased with it.

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Balthus : A Biography
Nicholas Fox Weber
Manufacturer: Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Balthus: A Biography
Nicholas Fox Weber
Manufacturer: Alfred A. Knopf
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0297643231

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Memorias Balthus (Ensayo-Mem)
M. Balthus
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Balthus: A Biography.(Review) (book review): An article from: New Criterion

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Balthus: A Biography.(Review) (book review): An article from: New Criterion
Merlin James
Manufacturer: Foundation for Cultural Review
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from New Criterion, published by Foundation for Cultural Review on January 1, 2000. The length of the article is 2183 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Balthus: A Biography.(Review) (book review)
Author: Merlin James
Publication: New Criterion (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2000
Publisher: Foundation for Cultural Review
Volume: 18 Issue: 5 Page: 66

Article Type: Book Review

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Desire and Avoidance in Art: Pablo Picasso, Hans Bellmer, Balthus, and Joseph Cornell. Psychobiographical Studies With Attachment Theory

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Desire and Avoidance in Art: Pablo Picasso, Hans Bellmer, Balthus, and Joseph Cornell. Psychobiographical Studies With Attachment Theory
Andrew Brink
Manufacturer: Peter Lang Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0820497215

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Desire and Avoidance in Art argues that while early developmental traumas can produce life-long creative endeavors with striking aesthetic results, they may also, for the male artist, result in destructive relations with women. Brink introduces the scheme of personality formation-as found in the work on infant and child development of John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Mary Main, Patricia Crittenden, Allen N. Schore, and others-to explore a new venture in psychobiography. He effectively uses the concept of "anxious attachment" to describe mother-infant/child relations and their sequelae. Using pertinent developmental data found in each artist's childhood, Andrew Brink accounts for the anxious-avoidant attachment style (or, in Crittenden's terminology, the Anxious/Controlling style) from which these artists suffered. He aims to explain why partnerships with women are sometimes hazardous and frequently tragic for male artists by referencing various feminist writers. Based on their viewpoints, Brink extracts psychodynamic explanations that are largely based on what the artists' imagery reveals. Furthermore, he explains how the attachment theory of attraction-avoidance is shown to supplement and enrich other ways of understanding chronically tense relations between the sexes. Brink focuses his attention on artists such as Picasso, Bellmer, Balthus, and Cornell, who are culturally powerful and often stimulate discussion about misogynic figures within a social context.

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Balthus : A Biography
Nicholas Fox Weber
Manufacturer: Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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